Song Miaozhu wasn't in a hurry. She planned to wait until her house spirit matured enough to manifest a dwelling as large as her old family estate. Only then would she pick a good spot on Xiaozhu Mountain and settle it there.
In the meantime, she poured all her energy into nurturing the house spirit. Whenever she had spiritual power to spare, she used it on spirit infusion and activation, giving the house spirit as much as it could handle. All other spiritual tools and creatures had to take a backseat.
Before long, the house spirit had successfully evolved into a true spiritual item.
The Spirit-Reflecting Bronze Mirror now showed a different result:
"...Choose the placement site of the house spirit with care. Once settled, moving the Spirit Dwelling will require sacrificing a portion of the spirit's essence. In the worst case, the spirit may revert to its initial state."
Everything else in the entry was the same, only the final section had changed. That meant it was now possible to relocate the Paper House Spirit Dwelling.
Even though moving came at the cost of the spirit's essence, Song Miaozhu thought the trade-off was well worth it.
The spirit's essence determined how large a dwelling it could manifest. If something forced her to relocate, she could still restore that essence over time. That was far better than losing the entire Spirit Dwelling.
Pleased with this new stage, she doubled her investment. Whenever she had time, she used top-grade spirit stones to recover her strength, then fed more energy to the house spirit. To her surprise, the more she nurtured it, the smaller the cost of relocation became.
At first, moving the Spirit Dwelling would wipe away all of the essence it had gained post-birth. But after one month of careful feeding, the loss had dropped to just 99 percent.
By then, the spirit's essence was enough to manifest a ground-level structure with three full rooms. It might have seemed fast, but in that one month alone, she had burned through at least 300 top-grade spirit stones. She spent less than half that amount on her own cultivation or other spiritual tools.
Every single day, she fed the house spirit to its absolute limit before calling it a night. After another month, the spirit could now manifest a two-story house.
By the end of the third month, the Spirit Dwelling could fully form the two-floor structure along with a spacious attic. The relocation cost had dropped again, now at 97 percent of its post-birth essence.
Song Miaozhu then fed it the two side-wing paper houses and continued to raise it. But before she could complete the next stage of growth, something unexpected happened.
She was in the middle of class at the underworld's Ghost Shop when one of her little paper servants, tasked with guarding the cave, reached out to her. It was one of the Fortune Gathering Dolls she had raised to gather ambient energy.
She glanced casually at the image it transmitted, not expecting much. But her eyes immediately widened.
"This is... a spiritual tide?"
On screen, the dolls on their shelves were absorbing spiritual energy far faster than usual. Points of spirit light steadily flowed into the paper bowls in their hands.
Before class, she had just drained those bowls of spiritual energy. They should have been empty.
But now, the paper bowls were nearly full again.
They might look small, but the energy stored inside was in liquid form, compressed into spiritual liquid. She had raised these dolls for quite some time, and their paper bowls had grown in capacity. Each one could now hold as much energy as three low-grade spirit stones.
Normally, it took an entire day to fill a bowl. Now, she'd only been in class for half an hour.
The energy intake rate had increased more than twentyfold.
There was only one explanation she could think of: the spiritual tide that cultivators had long awaited was finally here.
Curiously, there were no other visible points of spirit light in the cave. So she shifted her focus to her other paper servants.
At her paper shop in Huaihua Alley, beside Zhao Huoyan, and near Director Zhao himself, each of their perspectives showed a noticeable increase in the presence of spiritual energy.
The surveillance paper servant near the wire fence on Xiaozhu Mountain had a wider view. From there, she could see that spirit light was appearing throughout the ancient town nestled in the distant hills.
Across the town, many cultivators were already in the midst of absorbing the ambient energy, drawing the spirit light toward them. But even with that competition, the spiritual particles in the air were more abundant than she had ever seen—even more than during the initial revival, when hardly anyone had been cultivating.
Just then, the paper servant beside Director Zhao at The SEIU transmitted a global map of spirit energy distribution, captured by satellite.
In only thirty minutes, spiritual energy across the world had surged dramatically. The energy continued to gush out and was concentrating mainly in densely populated urban centers.
By contrast, remote regions—polar zones, oceans, deserts, and deep jungles—showed almost no activity.
One odd detail stood out. Although China had more cultivators actively drawing energy, its cities were not receiving any less spiritual influx compared to foreign cities.
A spiritual energy researcher quickly noticed this and proposed, "Is spiritual energy more likely to erupt where there are more cultivators?"
"Probably," another expert replied. "Active cultivators may attract more energy surges nearby. We've already noticed that regions near The SEIU branches are receiving significantly more influx than other urban areas. It's currently the middle of the night, so only internal staff who were notified about the spiritual tide are cultivating. That likely explains the difference."
"Spiritual surges like this are known as spiritual tides. After the tide comes a calm phase, then another surge. The number and duration of these tides vary during each revival cycle. We must seize this opportunity to ensure more spiritual energy erupts within our borders."
"Alert all cultivators nationwide to begin cultivating immediately. Draw in the tide," Director Zhao ordered without hesitation.
Within ten minutes, cultivators across the country received a text alert from The SEIU. Even those asleep were called directly by local officials.
"What? The spiritual tide is here? Time to cultivate and seize the energy?"
Lights flickered on in homes across the land.
Song Miaozhu quickly asked her ghost instructors for leave and returned to the living realm. There was no spirit light in the cave before, which strongly supported the experts' theory. Even with her stockpile of spirit stones, she wasn't about to waste this rare opportunity. She immediately joined the energy rush.
What she cultivated was the Fortune Gathering Dolls. While she refined her energy, the dolls helped her store ambient spiritual energy for future use, saving her spirit stones and increasing her haul during future spiritual tides.
Before she even finished crafting one new doll, she noticed something new.
Spiritual energy had begun to appear in the air within the cave.
And not just a little.
The rate at which she could absorb the energy while making dolls couldn't even keep up with the speed at which the spirit light was flooding in.
The paper bowls in the dolls' hands were already full, overflowing with spiritual liquid.
The energy in the cave was visibly thickening.
The spiritual energy experts had been right. The amount of energy pouring out really was tied to how many cultivators were actively cultivating.
But perhaps it also related to a cultivator's level?
Even though she was only one person, the amount of energy manifesting here didn't seem far behind the output in the town of Yuanshan, where at least ten thousand cultivators had gathered.